Used to be, you could mindlessly munch your morning cornflakes over the morning paper or television broadcast. Now you best set them aside – don’t want to spill on the keyboard.

The idyllic perusal of the day’s headlines, or even a hearty helping of CNN for dinner, went online a while ago. But the recent proliferation of online news aggregators – like the recently-launched Newser – has infused the breakfast brush-up with a Web 2.0 flavour.

Newser, which launched earlier this summer, has essentially animated the role of your local news editor in an attempt to “delivers the best information in concise, efficient summaries, together with photos, video and audio and links to original stories.”

Each section of Neweser – which is divided like a traditional newspaper, with “News” “Business” “Sports” and “Culture” tabs – consists of a web page featuring nine squares. Each square features a headline, news photo and one-sentence summary.

The process of selecting stories is all about measuring what newspaper editors would call ‘play.’ Newser engineers use a mathematical formula to measure the “ubiquity” of a particular story. The most widely-played stories make it into the nine squares.

Each square, when clicked, opens up into a complete multi-media package – a Newser-written summary of the story, plus photos, long lists of related links, plus video or audio.

Several high-profile media watchers have noticed Newser – its launch was noted on the Freakonomics blog as well as by PaidContent.org. So far, most of the reviews have been positive.

One review, at Mashable compared Newser to two other recently-launched news aggregators - Mahalo and ChaCha.

Critics have wondered why Newser culls from just 100 sites – which is indeed a bit curious because HighBeam Research, the Chicago-based group which created Newser, maintains a paid-subscription service which gives users access to “over 45 million articles from about 3300 newspapers magazines, journals, radio & TV transcripts and reference works.”

Newser draws its stories mainly from traditional mainstream media outlets. It does not search any weblogs, such as Del.icio.us, Technorati or Digg.

So, it remains to be seen how well Newser will ultimately compete with other popular news aggregators, such as Newsmap, Buzztracker or the video site Blinx.

Certainly, though, news aggregators are here to stay, providing yet another platform for news delivery.

K. Clore

Published: August 16, 2007